But that doesn't mean we can't learn something from how China is reacting to the recession with quick and massive stimulus that is succeeding in creating jobs and growth.

The world's largest human migration the annual crush of Chinese traveling home to celebrate the Lunar New Year, which is this Sunday is going a little faster this time thanks to a new high-speed rail line.

The Chinese bullet train, which has the world's fastest average speed, connects Guangzhou, the southern coastal manufacturing center, to Wuhan, deep in the interior. In a little more than three hours, it travels 664 miles, comparable to the distance from Boston to southern Virginia. That is less time than Amtrak's fastest train, the Acela, takes to go from Boston just to New York.

Even more impressive, the Guangzhou to Wuhan train is just one of 42 high-speed lines recently opened or set to open by 2012 in China. By comparison, the United States hopes to build its first high-speed rail line by 2014, an 84-mile route linking Tampa and Orlando, Fla.

China spent $88 billion dollars on high-speed rail investment in 2009 alone, a substantial increase from previous years. It rivals the construction of the interstate highway system in America in the 1950s for its audaciousness and use of public monies to spur jobs and growth. And it's working:

As China upgrades and expands its rail system, it creates the economies of large-scale production for another big export industry. The sheer volume of equipment that they will require, and the technology that will have to be developed, will simply catapult them into a leadership position, said Stephen Gardner, Amtrak's vice president for policy and development [...]

Officials drafted a plan to move much of the nation's passenger traffic onto high-speed routes by 2020, freeing existing tracks for more freight. Then the global financial crisis hit in late 2008. Faced with mass layoffs at export factories, China ordered that the new rail system be completed by 2012 instead of 2020, throwing more than $100 billion in stimulus at the projects.

Administrators mobilized armies of laborers 110,000 just for the 820-mile route from Beijing to Shanghai, which will cut travel time there to five hours, from 12, when it opens next year.

You can do this far more quickly in a command economy, of course. But it's the priority order that is striking. China needed economic stimulus, and rapidly accelerated public investment. The US (which actually has added more in stimulus than most countries in Europe) took a balanced approach based more on tax cuts. Aside from the question of what approach works better in terms of economic activity, look at the end result practically all of China will be served by high-speed rail within a matter of years.

It's not perfect. Some Chinese have complained about the fare costs. And again, a single decision-maker rather than a phalanx of competing interests makes decision-making that much easier. But there's something that can be learned here. If you want to create jobs, rather than the Rube Goldberg approach of tax breaks and nudges toward private investment, just go ahead and create the jobs. In the long run you'll have higher growth and a better quality of life for the nation.

The week before Thanksgiving, I attended an unusual symposium sponsored by the University of Denver Law Review entitled Cyber Civil Rights: New Challenges for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in our Networked Age. The symposium covered standard Cyberlaw topics, but the raison d'tre was University of Maryland law professor Danielle Citron's two recent articles on online harassment of women: "Law's Expressive Value in Combating Cyber Gender Harassment" (Michigan Law Review) and "Cyber Civil Rights" (Boston University Law Review). It is unusual for a law school to celebrate another school's professor and her research, especially when the professor is fairly junior. Nevertheless, Danielle's participation brought together academics from both the Cyberlaw and civil rights communities, which provided a rare and interesting mix of folks..

First Panel

Danielle Citron started off by recapping her two papers. Online participation, such as blogging, is essential to professional standing, and employers are reviewing online profiles of prospective employees as part of their hiring considerations. However, women are being targeted for abuse online. These attacks are harming women by changing their online and offline activities, reducing their job opportunities, and causing women to change their gender representations online. Further, folks are trivializing these problems. Women are underreporting the attacks, and law enforcement only intervenes when there are offline harms. New laws can serve an expressive function to communicate that online attacks against women are socially unacceptable. The new laws can validate women's feelings that they have been harmed and encourage law enforcement to pursue more cases.

Commenting on the papers, Robert Kaczorowski of Fordham Law (and Danielle's stepdad) made an extended analogy between the Ku Klux Klan and cybermobs.

Wendy Seltzer asked if we could deemphasize the effect of words rather than prohibit them. Danielle responded that we don't know how seriously to take any particular threat.

An audience member asked if is there a difference between mobs and individual actors who are just taking advantage of being anonymous. Danielle answered that groups can become more extreme online. I think this point deserves more exploration: a series of uncoordinated individual decisions to pile on to an attack can look like a coordinated attack to the victim. This is part of why I thought the KKK references were puzzlingKKK activities are clearly coordinated, while online attacks against women can succeed without any coordination or ongoing connection between the attackers.

Paul Ohm argued that that legal solutions are better for cyber civil rights problems than technological solutions. Paul discussed what he labeled Felten's Third Law. (He doesn't know of two earlier laws named for Ed Felten; he just assumes they exist given Ed's impressive and influential oeuvre). As articulated by Paul, Felten's Third Law is that in Cyberlaw conflicts, lawyers love technical solutions and technologists love legal solutions. In other words, we love the solution we don't know because we assume it has to be better than the one we do. As both a law professor and technologist, Paul picks law over technology for these problems.

Paul categorically rejects any technical solution that would create a fully identified Internet. For example, we should not mandate server log retention because we know the logs will be co-opted to regulate other forms of unwanted content, not just online harassment.

Wendy Seltzer discussed the unintended consequences of legal intervention. For example, mandatory Internet filtering in school libraries hasn't stopped kids from bypassing the filters, but it has facilitated a marketplace for improving filtering technologies that has benefited repressive regimes. Another example: anti-circumvention technology fails to restrict copying but has reduced innovation around DRMed content. Wendy also noted how norms can help curb abuses. For example, while there are online cesspools, she praised Wikipedia's evolving guidelines for living people's biographies.

In response, Danielle admitted that her solutions need to be more surgical. She said she might consider moving from a notice-and-takedown model to a notice-and-preserve model for intermediaries.

Second Panel

This panel was composed of three women academics from the civil rights community, so it was a noticeable shift from the typical Cyberlaw academic discussion.

Mary Anne Franks is a University of Chicago Bigelow Fellow and soon-to-be full-time law professor. She expresses our collective disappointment that cyberspace isn't a utopia that allows people to escape offline discrimination and harassment. She laments that women can lose control of their identities online, such as when someone creates a fake online profile in their names.

She then addressed how cyberspace is unique/special/different with respect to gender harassment. Many commentators try to duck cyberspace exceptionalism, so it was refreshing to see her tackle the issue squarely. Existing offline discrimination/harassment laws assume interactions between repeat players at work and school; online harassment can be divorced totally from any existing social networks. However, because the online activities still harm targeted individuals at work and school, we should treat the harms the same. Offline, there are switching costs to changing jobs or school; online, search engines' consolidation of results for search on a person's name creates a different type of switching cost. In terms of supervisory power, she thinks web operators have analogous control to employers or school administrators. Thus, when web operators receive notice of online harassment, they should have a duty to do something about it. Offline, employers can develop a variety of responses and policies to combat workplace harassment. Web operators should have similar latitude; for example, they can delete offending posts or suspend/ban accounts.

Helen Norton, a University of Colorado law professor, did not share Danielle's optimism (expressed in her first article) that existing discrimination laws can curb online harassment. Instead, Helen thinks a new civil rights statute is needed, but she might limit its remedies to exclude money damages. Helen is pessimistic that there will be regulation any time soon, noting that it can take years to enact civil rights legislation. Helen would also like to see more precise definitions of the exact harms that women are experiencing only online.

Nancy Ehrenreich, a Denver University law professor, began her talk by saying that we should not overstate the Internet's benefits. She then clarified that we should not assume that disadvantaged folks can overcome barriers online. For example, we impose cultural categories on people in every interaction, so even if people try to mask their identity online, they can't really escape. She wondered why we aren't talking about an anti-discrimination law for the web. Her concern is that discrimination denies individuals access to the Internet.

In Q&A, Paul Ohm observed that civil rights scholars often invoke free speech as the countervailing concern to their desired regulations, but Cyberlaw scholars are often more interested in other generative effects of the Internet, such as new business models, new labor models and new modes of production.

Panel 3

James Grimmelmann (see his slides) started with the Skanks in NYC case. In that case, the defendant criticized someone else in her social network on a blog, calling the plaintiff (among other unflattering things) a skank. The plaintiff sued to obtain the blogger's identity. After a successful unmasking, the plaintiff dropped the lawsuit, having successfully publicly shamed the blogger.

James hypothesized that this unmasking and shaming was an appropriate remedythe blogger got shamed (like an eye for an eye), and unmasking is a better outcome than other legal remedies like damage suits. James then posited a thought exercise that provided plaintiffs with an expedited unmasking procedure if they drop any damages claim. This would have a number of benefits. Unmasking curbs online harassment is especially effective at busting online mobs. Also, an unmasking remedy avoids messy debates over the First Amendment's scope, and it may be more desirable than trying to hold online providers liable.

Having advanced his own strawman, James then cut it down. In some cases, defamation remedies may be more desirable, and plaintiffs may not know that until they learn the putative wrongdoer's identity. In other cases, plaintiffs who just want unmasking would appreciate a lower legal hurdle. Also, we provide legal protection for anonymity for good reasons.

James' lessons from the thought exercise: we should consider ways to decouple an unmasking remedy from litigation. At the same time, we need to protect defendants from pretextual unmasking; in some cases, retaliation is a big concern, and we should incorporate this concern into the unmasking decision.

From Chris Wolf's talk (see his full remarks), the most interesting thing I learned is that 18 states have laws banning wearing masks in public, enacted to suppress KKK activities. This was the second speaker's KKK reference of the day, and it made me wonder if we were experiencing some variation of Godwin's Law.

Panel 4

Viva Moffat observed that secondary liability issues generate the most heat in online harassment discussions. She expressed concern that imposing legal duties on third parties may not help law's norm-shaping effect, and it's not appropriate to impose liability just because the provider has deeper pockets or the direct actor can't be found. She also suggested that imposing liability on third parties creates a greater risk of collateral damage than direct liability. [Note: I would like to know more about this last assertion. I suspect we cannot make a utilitarian calculation a priori]. As a result, she favors focusing more efforts on sharpening direct liability.

Ed Felten talked about identifying and anonymizing online activity. He explained the usual sequence of events in chasing bad online content:

log file => IP address => identity => justice

But the IP address => identity step breaks down when users use an anonymizing proxy or the user's network uses network address translation (used by home wireless routers or in coffee shops) and all connected devices' requests share a single IP address. He said that a majority of Internet connections use NAT.

Because IP address tracebacks can dead-end at the intermediary, an IP address can reveal too little information. However, even when users aren't investigatory targets, IP addresses can reveal too much information, such as geolocation. This paradoxIP addresses simultaneously reveal both too much and too little informationreflects that the IP address system was built for routing, not identification. So could we design a better authenticating technology?

He then conducted a semi-realistic thought experiment of a new technological tag that could be used instead of IP addresses. This tag could have the following attributes:

* can be placed by any intermediary
* conveys no information about the sender unless unwrapped by the intermediary (presumably for good legal cause)
* unwrapping the tag yields the best identity information the intermediary has
* the tag's use is voluntary as a technical matter
* the tag is removable as a technical matter

I then batted clean-up. A summary of my remarks:

Today's conversation has revisited long-standing Cyberlaw issues, such as:

* anonymity v. accountability, and who should be responsible for online content and actions
* cyberspace as a physical place. See, e.g., Noah v. AOL (an online discrimination case), National Federation of the Blind v. Target (also an online discrimination case) and Estavillo v. Sony
* cyberspace exceptionalism and cyberspace utopianism (on the latter point, see my article on search engine utopianism)
* when is the optimal time to regulate rapidly evolving technology? Early, when the technology is still in its infancy, or later, when market forces and new technological evolutions may have cured the early problems?

Danielle's articles convinced me that women are experiencing serious harms online that menincluding mecould easily trivialize. Danielle's articles also convinced me that online harassment has strong parallels to the 1970s legal evolution of workplace harassment doctrines, where a big part of the battle was to get people to take the harms seriously.

While I find a lot of descriptive value in Danielle's work, the normative implications are not as clear. As usual with attempts to regulate rapidly evolving technology, there are many important but overwhelmingly hard definitional challenges, such as who is an intermediary, what are online mobs and what constitutes online harassment. For example, I do not think the Skanks in NYC incident is an online harassment case or an attack, but James Grimmelmann's talk assumed those characterizations.

While we can debate what should be the right level of regulatory intervention, we should not overlook that Congress already enacted a law squarely governing intermediary liability for online harassment: 47 USC 230. The angst that prompted this conferencebad behavior onlineis the logical consequences of 230's broad immunity. The statute enables websites to adopt policies that they will not police user content or retain server logs of user activity. These choices aren't a surprise or a per se abuse of the immunity; instead, they are the unavoidable implications of Congress' action.

We might question Congress' wisdom in adopting 230, but we should not diminish its potential importance to the Internet as we know it. [In Q&A, Chris Wolf asked about the comparative experience in countries that don't have such broad immunity. In those countries, we know that websites take down user content much more freely, and I believe that the most interesting UGC innovations are all taking place here in the US, not countries with more restrictive UGC liability.] I can, at most, only prove correlation and not causation, but I believe 230 is one of the main causal reasons why the Internet has succeeded so well.

When I speak around the country about 230, I often encounter folks who generally accept 230's immunity scope but want just one new exception, i.e., their pet topic. If everyone got their just one exception, the law would be eviscerated. (I said it would be Swiss-cheesed to death; maybe I should have said it would be overcome by a thousand duck bites). I'm not rejecting new exceptions categorically (they should be each considered on their own merits), but in aggregate 230's immunization benefits are actually quite precarious. I believe 230 works precisely because of its strength and simplicity, so adding more exceptions could significantly reduce its efficacy.

I concluded my remarks by observing that online harassment is a subspecies of bullying and incivil behavior in our society. While we can and should work to curb online harassment, I am more interested in addressing bullying and incivility in all its forms, wherever it takes place.

In this regard, I have been impressed by how my son's school is proactively addressing bullying. See more about this effort, called Project Cornerstone. The school is teaching kids not to bully or to tolerate being bullied, and the project gives bullied kids tools to go on the offensive against bullies. There's no guarantee that anti-bullying programs will work in the short or long run, but I remain hopeful that online harassment today partially reflects that many current Internet users never got any anti-bullying education. Perhaps, then, online harassment issues will naturally abate (without any regulatory intervention) as new generation of Internet users, better educated about bullying, come onto the Internet.

Following my remarks, we had more Q&A.

Paul Ohm Q: Some cyber folks argue against secondary liability because they believe that a victim can pursue a direct action, but Ed's talk suggests that user anonymity will continue to be possible.

Mary Anne Franks: civil rights isn't about individual claims because victims have to bear too high a burden to pursue claims. Instead, civil rights are about changing large-scale social norms. The goal is to achieve anti-discrimination by any means necessary. Thus, civil rights scholars have already discussed and concluded that it's appropriate to impose liability on intermediaries like employers and schools.

Danielle: intermediaries are the lowest cost avoiders.

James Grimmelmann: no, the harassers are the lowest cost avoiders. Civil rights folks would get more support from the Cyberlaw crowd if they focused their regulatory desires towards intermediaries who are in active concert with the bad actors.

Danielle's Wrap-Up

We all agree that:

* education can make a big difference
* online communities need to self-police
* there are numerous limits to using the law as a solution, including that lawsuits don't make sense and 230's immunity.

We don't agree on what to do next. There are First Amendment limits, and technology doesn't offer any panaceas.

Trademark owners with registrations can register their trademarks with Facebook in order to block potentially infringing URLs from being created. Here is a link to the submission page.

We shall see if this actually becomes an issue similar to cybersquatting in domain names, but due to the shortness of time between now and the 13th I'm posting the information here to help get the word out. Please let me know in the comments below what you think of this process and how Facebook has handled it. Personally, it would have been nice for there to have been more notice.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut), who helms the Senate's government affairs committee, is annoyed enough that he bypassed the administrators of the system and sent a letter Friday straight to the Judicial Conference of the United States.

He's asking Judge Lee H. Rosenthal to explain why in the age of Google the Public Access to Court Electronic Records, or PACER, system isn't free for citizens. He'd also like to know why federal courts still aren't blacking out sensitive information in court documents as required in the 2002 E-Government Act (a piece of legislation dear to Lieberman).

He writes:

Seven years after the passage of the E-Government Act, it appears that little has been done to make these records freely available with PACER charging a higher rate than 2002. Furthermore, the funds generated by these fees are still well higher than the cost of dissemination ...

If the complaints sound familiar, perhaps you know of public.resource.org's Carl Malamud who's been running a virtual one-man campaign against the clunky and costly PACER system. It's just part of his campaign to "open-source the nation's operating system."

He's also been vigilantly searching through court documents and using automated tools and has found that some judicial districts routinely fail to redact information that would be very handy for identity thieves to have. He's also found just plainly embarrassing and invasive information like medical records of patients not even involved in litigation.

Malamud is running a campaign to become the nation's public printer, and from the looks of this letter, he's already got one senator's attention.

See Also:

• Online Rebel Publishes Millions of Dollars in U.S. Court Records ...
• Rogue Archivist Campaigns to Be Obama's Printer
• Contrarian Libertarian
• Death to Sleepy Stock Data

The case highlights the legal challenges facing courts and school administrators as they grapple with campus civil order and free expression in an online world.

"We're in the very first generation of this and there's nothing ripe for the U.S. Supreme Court to hear," said Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Virginia-based Student Press Law Center.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in a Florida federal court, concerns Katherine Evans, now 19, who was suspended as a senior last year after creating a Facebook group devoted to her English teacher. The group was called "Ms. Sarah Phelps is the worst teacher I've ever met!," and featured a photograph of the teacher, and an invitation for other students to "express your feelings of hatred."

After people's comments derided Evans for the online stunt, and expressed support for the teacher, she deleted the group. But Pembroke Pines Charter High School, which did not respond for comment, suspended Evans for three days for "disruptive behavior" and for "Bullying / Cyber Bullying Harassment towards a staff member," according to the lawsuit, which is backed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Evans was removed from her from advanced placement classes "and forced her into the lesser-weighted honors classes." The lawsuit alleges the black mark on Evans' permanent record is "unjustifiably straining her academic reputation and good standing."

The lawsuit(.pdf) is one of about a dozen across the United States that are part of the fallout as schools confront cyberbullying and the explosion of social networking sites. A Texas high school volleyball coach in September went so far as to declare a ban on student Facebook and MySpace profiles, a decision the Northside Independent School District reversed(.pdf). Last month, Tennessee State University blocked the online gossip site JuicyCampus at the school firewall. In June, Missouri enacted a law against "cyberbullying" in the wake of the Megan Meier suicide tragedy, which was triggered by a hoax MySpace account.

Before the internet, student speech cases usually concerned student newspapers and dress codes.

There's no bright-line rule on what constitutes free, student speech in the online world. And as schools start to regulate off-campus student speech on the internet, lawsuits are following.

The U.S. Supreme Court has never addressed the parameters of online student speech, but might soon. So far, lower courts are following a 1969 high court ruling saying student speech is protected unless it is "substantially disruptive," though the road map provided by that decision is leading different judges to varying destinations. In that landmark case, the Supreme Court said students had a First Amendment right to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War.

Generally, the courts have allowed the suppression of student speech, online or off, when it threatens bodily harm and advocates illegal activity, "none of which we have in Ms. Evans' case," said one of the teen's attorneys, Matthew D. Bavaro, of Plantation, Florida.

"She has the absolute First Amendment right to do this," Bavaro said. "The question is how far does the school's authority go to punish off-campus speech they don't like? If Katie had praised the teacher, would she have been punished? The school is judging what is appropriate speech."

But with the explosion of the internet and social networking sites, "The courts are figuring out where the boundaries end and start when it comes to off-campus speech," LoMonte said.

On Wednesday, the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, one court level below the Supreme Court, will hear oral arguments in a lawsuit similar to the Florida case filed Monday.

The appeal concerns Justin Layshock, who, as a senior and honors student at a Pennsylvania high school, was suspended for 10 days after creating a mock MySpace profile of his principal.

The profile said the principal took drugs and kept beer at his desk. A federal judge overturned the suspension, ruling last year that the fake profile was not created at school and did not create a "substantial disruption."

"Public schools are vital institutions, but their reach is not unlimited," U.S. District Judge Terrence McVerry of Pennsylvania ruled last year.

Hickory High School appealed.

According to Monday's lawsuit, Evans used no profanities and stated no threats against the teacher. The suspension notice from the public school alleged only that Evans "had posted an inappropriate site regarding her teacher on Facebook." Evans is demanding that the suspension be removed from her record.

According to the DA and the Orange County Sheriff, Khan and fellow student Tanvir Singh committed their crimes between January and May 2008, breaking into the school on numerous times using a stolen key. The brilliant Khan also attempted to steal a teacher's password to push his grades and those of other twelve students. All of this while both were exchanging text messages discussing their activities the whole time.

Apparently, the smartymorons then pushed their C, D and F grades to As and Bs, hoping that nobody would notice. But when Khan got denied admission in the University of California, he went back to school to ask for a new transcript.

Being a bad student, the school administrators noticed the new stellar grade record, starting the investigation that has ended in this court case, and Khan's potential 38 year degree in laundry systems, cooking, and inter-personal communication, with a second major in shower plumbing, sponsored by California's state prison system. [CRN via The Inquirer]

The main change affects "top diggers," the few submitters who contribute a huge percentage of the stories that make the Digg front page. These users, who have all submitted thousands of stories each, submit more than 10 percent of stories that make the front page of Digg. Muhammad Saleem -- known as msaleem on Digg -- has submitted 1,201 articles that eventually made the front page. He tells Valleywag that prior to the algorithm change, it would take him between 110 and 130 Diggs for a submitted story to make the front page. Now, it can take more than 200.

A top digger submits a story, it gets 100 diggs and then sits there in upcoming queue for 8 to 10 hours getting 180-190 votes and not being promoted to the front page. Other stories with 40 votes (from newbie users) get promoted from under you. Everyone loses. Good content submitted by top users is doomed to fail.

It seems a fairly transparent strategy to clean house of the submitters who have been dominating the front page for a while now. Essentially [they] adjusted the diversity factor to skew against popular submitters. Digg-critical stories are frequently buried before they ever reach the front page.

Our theory? Digg is attempting to throttle the number of stories that make the front page. As more and more stories get promoted to the front page of Digg -- FP'd, in Digg-lingo -- stories spend less time in the spotlight. By increasing the number of votes it takes for a story to make the front page, turnover should decrease.

I also spoke to Drew Curtis, proprietor of Fark.com, a semi-competitor of Digg's, about the changes.

Fark is a benevolent dictatorship or as I like to call it, a house party. You can come in and have a good time with the rest of us but if you shit on the floors and tell me my sense of decor sucks and the beer is awful, you're gone.

Digg is like Student Government on any given campus. It's a full-blown governmental institution completely ignored by the administrators, created for the appearance of having a say in what's going on. No wonder there is chaos. Or maybe it's more like Soviet Russia, where you're told you've got freedom and a voice and can make a difference, but you really can't do shit.

Digg's trying to do one of two things, either improve the quality of submissions or drive the pageviews up. I would suspect the latter, once VC gets involved it's all about the money.Digg founder Kevin Rose posted on the Digg Blog about the recent changes, saying "as we point out in our FAQ, occasionally you will see stories in the upcoming section with 100+ Diggs - this is evidence of our promotion algorithm hard at work. One of the keys to getting a story promoted is diversity in Digging activity. When the algorithm gets the diversity it needs, it will promote a story form the Upcoming section to the home page."

But Kevin, why won't you make these algorithm changes transparent? Why won't you make public who buries the stories? Why do you refuse to acknowledge the existence of moderators manipulating stories behind the scenes? Isn't "social media" about openness and transparency? Fark has never pretended to be open. There is editorial control behind every story that makes it to the front page.

If there continues to be manipulation and big brother-esque control behind the iron curtain of Digg, the users may soon give up and look for social news elsewhere, taking their page views with them.

I attempted to reach Digg CEO Jay Adelson and founder Kevin Rose via email. Rose was in a meeting at the time, and has not gotten back to me yet.